When Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868—just three years after the end of the Civil War and less than a century after the first shots of the Revolutionary War rang out in her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts—could she have imagined that the character of Jo March, who she modeled on herself, would still ring true for ambitious, bookish, free-spirited girls today?
How many millions of us have found ourselves in her words: “I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle—something heroic, or wonderful—that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don't know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day.”
In putting her own ambitions to paper, Alcott gave generations of girls a template for dreaming big, and living boldly. ―Amy Traverso, Yankee senior food editor
